Great Western Coffee Shop

Now where have I heard something like this mentioned before? Ah yes on the S&D. I'm sure others could point out tactics like this that lead to the closing of other lines. Without wishing to go off topic but I will on this one. I have a copy of the 1965-66 Southern region timetable which shows that on Saturdays during the summer months, when the S&D would actually carry more passengers wanting to head to the coast, many services would stop running before the summer peak season and then resume again after the summer peak leaving a skeleton service that was no use to anyone. Good old BR eh????

More off-topic (well, Timmer started it! ;D ) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaGiewYBHmM sounds familiar?  ::)

Any evidence for that? As Ian Batten wrote on uk.railway:

I think there was a lot of politics and score settling involved in the West country rail closures,although how they filtered through to Beeching's eventual decisions i don't really know.As you say,the S and D suffered from re-routeing of traffic,taking the passenger census when schools were on holiday,bizarre timetabling,etc.I was always particularly puzzled by the imbalance in the ratio of seaside/coastal railway closures in Devon and Cornwall.Bude,Padstow,Lyme Regis [slightly in Dorset,i know],Seaton,Sidmouth,Ilfracombe,Budleigh Salterton and very nearly Exmouth [now carrying hundreds of thousands of passengers per year] all lost their railways and were all Southern stations.GWR closures? Helston,Fowey [although still served by freight],Brixham and the line from Chacewater to Newquay,which was served by another line anyway.Maybe there was a rational and logical explanation for this apparent imbalance,certainly gives food for thought.

Well,the strange timetables would seem to be evidence enough from my point of view.

Yours is probably a voice of sanity and reason in what is still a fairly emotive subject,even after all these years,Richard! ;D It can't be denied though,that the ex Southern routes in Devon and Cornwall[and beyond,if you look at the absurd singling and running down of the superb Exeter-Salisbury line] fared considerably worse than the ex GWR ones.I know from my family experience that there was extreme loathing between the employees of the two companies/regions and it seemed a strange coincidence that matters deteriorated significantly for the SR after the WR takeover in the early sixties.Still,all done and dusted,damage done now-all of the relevant people who knew the truth are probably no longer with us.


Back on topic,any idea of the progress being made by Kilbride/DCC/WDBC on the reopening?

Many of the tactics used in running down the S&D for closure were also employed elsewhere. To the list of GWR closures in Devon and Cornwall, you can add Launceston, Ashburton, Princetown, Kingsbridge, Kingswear, Moretonhampstead, Heathfield-Exeter, and Barnstaple from (Taunton), some of these having already happened even before the Beeching swathe of the Sixties. 

That's not "evidence" that supports any conspiracy theory; a more plausible explanation is that they just weren't able to respond to the loss of traffic effectively.

Unless you have written proof that they were determined to run the service down, simple incompetence is far more likely: just look at the way British Railways pissed squirted the Modernisation Plan money up the wall...

I would welcome advice as to where that written proof could be obtained.I recently purchased a book called "The Great Railway Conspiracy" by a chap called David Henshaw,which i have not had time to read as yet,possibly that will provide some relevant information.It does strike me as rather odd though that perfectly rational timetables [obviously designed by able people] should suddenly turn into ones that were far from rational and frankly not much use to anybody,through simple incompetence.Perhaps the truth was that,as Richard B suggested earlier,that BR simply regarded the lines such as the S and D and the SR mainline as dead ducks and were prepared to spend only minimal amounts to keep them going.

If any existed, do you not think it would have been found by now?  ::)

Well, christian Wolmar certainly seems to buy into the conspiracy theory:

"British Railways^ tactic of gradually reducing services on lines it secretly earmarked for closure until no one bothered to use them, meant that many of Beeching^s recommendations were effectively predetermined"

Seen here, in an article which also assesses Henshaw's work on the subject: http://www.christianwolmar.co.uk/2008/09/rail-600-beeching-cannot-be-blamed-for-all-the-railways-ills/



(I intentionally typed his name as "christian" up there as he appears to prefer the non-capitalisation of the C word himself, as can be seen 7 or 8 lines down in the above article)

As for TJ's remark about evidence not being found; my own specialist subject happens to be obscure psychedelic rock music, which reached its peak not long after Beeching's own heyday in 1967/8, and you'd be astounded at the material, both in terms of tapes and documentary evidence (photos & contracts etc), which is continually being unearthed for the first time even today, particularly as key people who worked in that environment pass away and their estates are distributed. To assume evidence doesn't exist just because it has yet to come to light is treading on very, very thin ice indeed.

Not necessarily,no.

No it doesn't!



And are there as many researchers, historians and keen amateurs looking into the history of "obscure psychedelic rock music" as there are into the railways? No? Thought not...

That's a short sighted comment given that one person can discover something that thousands of others miss

The above posts, which discuss the wider implications of the Beeching cuts, have been split off from the Tavistock reopening topic, at http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=804.msg103147#msg103147

I'm sorry if any of the resulting discussions on these two topics now seem slightly 'clunky' as a result: I did do my best to iron out any overlaps! ::)

It should be remembered that there was a general belief that railways were a Victorian anachronism that lasted in many places into the 1980s. Witness 'Option A' from the Serpell Report - although I've always suspected that it was leaked deliberately to create a climate where major rail closures were political dynamite. Even the Dorchester-Castle Cary line, mentioned in all potential closure reports, was never that close to closing down so far as I know.

I can't see that there was a conspiracy theory. The Great Western lines always served a larger population than the Southern lines and in Devon the only remainder of the ex-GW branches is the Paignton line, which was never going to close and is hardly a 'traditional' branch line. The Exmouth, Barnstaple and Bere Alston lines remain in comparison and while the first is too busy and the third too irreplaceable, it's arguable the Taunton-Barnstaple line could have stayed in favour of the Exeter-Barnstaple line to give North Devon a better link to London. I don't believe that was ever likely, but it's not implausible the figures could have been massaged to present a case if there was a conspiracy.

In Cornwall, the St Ives and Looe lines survived because they couldn't be replaced while the Falmouth line was certainly too busy. The Newquay line is something of a survivor admittedly (though does have particularly good summer traffic) but as has been said elsewhere, the Southern branches unfortunately just didn't serve large enough towns in the main to justify their retention at the time.

The S&D had the problem that in 72 miles between Bath and Bournemouth, the largest town it served was (I think) Blandford Forum, modern population under 9000. The route was also limited to 60mph at best and had sharp gradients and lengthy single track sections which would have been very expensive to double. Other than stubs being retained as branch lines from Bath to Radstock and Poole to Blandford, it's difficult to see how it was ever going to survive as a through route. However, I am saying this from a modern perspective.

Stand to be corrected,but i thought that the Exmouth and Bere Alston/Gunnislake lines were both earmarked for closure in the Beeching report and were only saved by prolonged campaigning? I'm not quite sure what you mean by saying that the St Ives and Looe lines "couldn't be replaced".Genuine question,was there something different about those lines that made them more irreplaceable than say,the Seaton or Bude branches?

It wouldn't have made much difference - Barnstaple to Taunton (six trains per day, none on Sundays) took 1:45, while Barnstaple to Exeter (ten per day, three on Sundays) was anything from 1:04 to 1:17. For example, in 1965 (links to timetables below), the 10:42 Barnstaple to Taunton would have given you a three minute connection at Taunton to Paddington, but the 10:38 Barnstaple to Exeter had a more robust 19 minute connection into the same train at Exeter.

There was also a greater range of destinations via Exeter (and through trains to exotic places like Waterloo, Kingswear, Brighton and Honiton), but in any case there was much greater local traffic between Barnstaple and Exeter than there ever would have been between Barnstaple and Taunton.

Western Region Timetable, 1965 (First Half):
London Paddington to Bristol and the West of England (http://www.timetableworld.com/image_viewer.php?id=12&section_id=11)
Taunton to Barnstaple (http://www.timetableworld.com/image_viewer.php?id=12&section_id=53)
Exeter St Davids to Plymouth (via Okehampton) and Ilfracombe (http://www.timetableworld.com/image_viewer.php?id=12&section_id=49)

Working on the railways in th Beeching era we were basically running at huge loss (subsidy) and the pressure was on to cut costs.

The planners were quite hard working at trying to save lines but the figures, fiddled or not were against them, especialy as there wasn't the captital to do things like install AHB etc and simplified single line working without tokens and signalmen at intemediate stations. Hence the S&D and many other lines would have required almost complete resiganlling and lot of track improvements to get it up to a proper mainline standard to give the speed to compete with the private car.

Gerry Fienes in his superb book I Tried to Run a Railway says they sat down and worked out the expected traffic to Exeter and how best serve it. It came down to Paddington to Exeter via Bristol! Things were that bad. Fortuantely both the Salisbury and Westbury routes survied the former by drastic rationalisation.

The thing that got me about Beeching was that he rationalised a 1922 railway. If a route had been A to C serving B run by the Midland then it was still run by the Midland  but in many cases there might  also route between A & D also serving B run by GC (which was hated by Midalnd men up to it's closure. Instead of rationalisg the service onto one route perhaps by serve AB C D in some cases this could have been done by  rerouting as the junctions existed. Or by putting in spurs. A classic case being Barnsley.

However Beeching diddn't do that he looked at routes A to C and A to D and closed them both. The classic being the Lene Vally North of Nottingham where you had Midalnd GC and GN running parrallel and serving Mansfield. The link to Mansfield on the Midalnd was severed and the GC and GN shut. Now we have the reopened Robin Hood line running mostly on the Midland but using a short stretch of the GC GN North of Annersley. This kind of rationalisation could have taken palce in many other places.

 BR freight were the most succesful at achieving this also in Nottinghamshire by the provison of a couple of spurs at Shirebrook they were able to single serve all the large Nottinghamshire pits and bring the MGRs into use. Which was one of the successes of the Beeching report. OK so perhaps we shouldn't have burnt so much coal but we did have a relaible electricty supply for all those years. What we should have done is use our technology skills to devise clean coal burning and carbon capture we could have been world leaders but there were too many "bean counters" in the way. Rant over.

What I meant to say is that the St Ives and Looe branches couldn't be adequately replaced by road transport. Anyone who's been to St Ives in the summer will know what I mean, while Looe's road connections to the A38 (and Liskeard or Plymouth) appear rather meandering. To take your examples in comparison, Seaton is fairly easy to reach from Axminster and has regular buses to Exeter, while Bude has a fairly fast (by bus standards) bus service to Exeter along A roads.

You're right though about Gunnislake and Exmouth - the Gunnislake branch originally went to Callington but that had better road connections so it was truncated at Gunnislake. Exmouth was originally listed but survived - I'm not sure how sustained the campaign was, but the passenger numbers certainly made a difference there.

Incidentally, it's interesting to note the journey times for the Tarka line haven't changed much from the 1965 timetable. I suspect that due to the overall 70/55/60mph speed limit the acceleration of modern units can only make a small difference.

I'd just like to thank TJ for the timetable links. Made for very interesting reading.

All those trains that had restaurant cars and only 10s/- for a full breakfast...... :P

http://www.timetableworld.com/timetable_catalog.php?cat=4

Indeed, I second that. Great to see someone is working towards getting previous editions of the Regional and National Rail Timetables online. Most useful.

The Exmouth branch was the only line in the UK that was listed in the Beeching report that BR actually refused to close, it was very strange that it was listed in the first place as it exceeded the benchmark minimum passengers per week set by beeching for a closure and the line also returned higher recipts than the minimum benchmark.

I notice someone touched on the Serpell report, the option A was basically the only railway that could operate with nil subsidy from government, Serpell was asked to create these reports and he did!

Only 10s/-? Hmm...

So given that a Travelling Chef breakfast meal deal costs GBP 9.95 (assuming the website is up-to-date) and this does not appear to include coffee or tea, discuss...

The North Devon (Tarka) Line had a lucky escape (also the Oke/Meldon line, of course). In the early 60's The Exe bridges at Cowley were on the verge of collapse, with plans in place to provide road transport replacement. The  cost to replace them was ^600k in today's money. Apparently the bean-counters in London considered this to be a gross misuse of public funds and wanted the line shut.

However, the Barnstaple - Taunton line had already been earmarked for closure and it was considered politically unnaceptable to sever the rail link north of Exeter.

Once the decision to keep the line had been taken, the cost of the new bridges 'miraculously' dropped to around ^400k (I'm told) - strange, eh?

 

I uncovered this tale in the National Archives a couple of years ago and wrote a piece for the Tarka Rail Association newsletter.

In 1965, BR told the Ministry of Transport that the Cowley Bridges needed replacing at a cost of over ^300k.  They said that although the Barnstaple and Okehampton lines had not been included in the Beeching list, they felt the expenditure could not be justified.

They looked at keeping the Taunton line for Barnstaple and retaining a line to Launceston from Plymouth for the Okehampton catchment area.  Both were felt to be dead losses so they applied for permission to put both the Exeter - Barnstaple and Exeter - Okehampton lines up for closure.

The Government told them (in no uncertain terms) that Barnstaple was not to be left without a rail service and shortly after the BRB authorised the ^300k spend on the Cowley Bridges (through very gritted teeth.)  The price for the bridge works didn't miraculously drop.

Barnstaple's rail link was saved in 1965 and when Beeching was still BR Chairman. 

Sitting in the very quiet reading room at the National Archives seeing this story unfold in the papers I was reading was quite something. 

Richard Burningham
Devon & Cornwall Rail Partnership
(BR Travel Centre Manager, Barnstaple, 1985 -7)






 

Thanks for offering that fascinating insight, Richard.  :)

I can understand why the whole line from Launceston to Plymouth was felt to be a "dead loss" but Tavistock!.How did the bean counters justify the complete removal of the important market town of Tavistock from the rail network at Plymouth in 1968 by truncating the LSWR main line just over 5 miles short at Bere Alston.I suppose ultimately Tavistock was effectively sacrificed to help ensure the closure of the LSWR route as a through main line between Plymouth and Exeter by creating a gap between Bere Alston and Okehampton.Hindsight is of course a wonderful thing.

Interesting to speculate what could have been with vision and a decent budget.Daft to leave Launceston without a railway IMHO.How about if the line from Launceston to Halwill had been closed but the one from Launceston to Lydford retained and developed to give a good connection between an upgraded North Cornwall line and the SR mainline? It was never going to happen in the prevailing thinking of the times of course,but interesting nevertheless.

Although with the benefit of hindsight a lot of the 1960s closures look foolish, nevertheless at the time they were, in my opinion, largely inevitable in that BR was losing huge chunks of money, the government of the day didn't wish to subsidise further and hence BR managers had to look for savings where they could ( and they did try modernisation of lines rather than closing e.g 4 wheel railbuses).   And to be fair to Beeching himself - he was fulfilling the brief set to him by government which was to try and get the railways onto a reasonably good financial footing.

British Railways was also losing huge chunks of money because it wasn't being managed particularly well. That is, at the very top and in Whitehall. The Modernisation Plan was ill conceived and actioned.

As a sop to the regions, differing ideas as to how best to modernise were allowed rather than the system as a whole working together to find the best solutions. Thus we had Diesel Electrics, developed alongside Diesel Hydraulics and to a lesser extent Gas Turbines. Added to that were far too many types of locomotives developed to replace steam engines. Done mostly on a like for like basis rather than using economies of scale to develop multi-purpose locomotives. We had a plethora of different ideas about electrification, leading to numerous different systems installed across the network. Then there was the costly mistake of building freight marshaling yards at a time when goods traffic was moving away from small wagons toward containerisation.

All that money was wasted before Dr Beeching fetched his axe from the woodshed and got out the whetstone.

A missed opportunity and one that, if better conceived, could well have seen more parts of the network remain viable. That's not to say though that some lines really did need to close. But perhaps if the Modernisation Plan had been better thought out, then Dr Beeching would've only needed his pruning shears rather than his chopper!

Hi Richard

Thanks for the correction. Fascinating all the same.

Just goes to show you can't believe everything you're told on a long, dark trip to Barnstaple :)

Regards

Paul




Edit note: Quote marks fixed. CfN. :-X

In the spirit of the season, a cracker joke for you:

Q. Why did Dr Beeching's Christmas tree look rather pathetic?
A. He'd chopped off half the branches.

It should be remembered that Beeching's main architect was the Government Minister Ernest Marples who was at one time a director of Marples, Ridgway who won the contract to build the M1 not saying he had a vested interest as he did resign his directorate before being appointed Minister for Transport but his wife still held a lot of shares in Marples, Ridgway.

Since the dawn of the railways in the UK the Government have interfered in one way or another, the grouping into the big 4 in 1923 was the way the Government bailed out of having to settle lots of compensation claims due to War Work, even today the Government like to tinker even worse when the colour of the rosette changes

 In 1963, the Southern and Western Regions did a survey of the competing routes to the South West of England and found that five times as many West Country passengers used the Paddington route to Exeter and beyond, and that, although the SR route was shorter, the WR route was quicker. They also concluded that concentrating expresses on the SR route would either require a new spur at Exeter, or time wasting reversal of all Plymouth and Exeter trains at Exeter St Davids (no HSTs or DVTs in 1963!). Focusing expresses on the Southern Route would also have resulted in a less attractive direct service from Taunton to London.

Given the arguments above and also that the Southern lines west of Salisbury were losing money heavily from the late 1950s (in 1957, these lines were failing to cover direct costs by ^800,000), the Western Region announced in February 1964 that the WR route would be the trunk route with the SR route restricted to serving a limited number of intermediate stations between Salisbury and Exeter. Over the next 3 years, the WR removed loss making branch lines (e.g. Axminster, Seaton, Sidmouth) and Salisbury - Exeter stopping services, and further cut costs in 1967 by singling the line, leaving the 2 hourly semi-fast service which ran in various iterations until December 2009.

You can argue in retrospect that the WR pruned the services too much, but the cost cutting made sense at the time, and their plan to focus on semi-fast services was, in my opinion, the right one for the long term survival of the line.

I'd agree with most of that, apart from axing the branches to the holiday destinations. It's as if they wanted fewer people on the mainline. They could have been run very cheaply with a singe car DMU, no signals, no station staff just to connect to the 2 hourly trains.

i think there was a general view at the times that railways were a Victorian relic and would be limited to a few major routes in due course (as per general beliefs about Beeching II and that all non-trunk routes selected for development would be closed).

That said, the original 1967 singling of the Salisbury-Exeter line was fairly absurd. It was as follows:

Exeter St Davids - Pinhoe - double track (Pinhoe had been closed in 1966, so why create a junction?)
Pinhoe - Honiton - single
Honiton loop
Honiton - Chard Junction - single with a long siding at Seaton Junction (lasted till around 1986)
Chard Junction loop (again Chard Junction station was closed in 1966, so why have a loop there?)
Chard Junction - Sherborne - single. There had been a plan to close Yeovil Junction and make all Yeovil passengers get a bus to/from Sherborne as Junction is some way out of town. Due to major opposition it never happened.
Sherborne - Templecombe - double (again Templecombe closed in 1966 - though the obvious comment that it ceases to be double before the platform does at least have that excuse)
Templecombe - Gillingham - single
Gillingham loop
Gillingham - Wilton South - single (again Wilton closed in 1966)

You have to wonder why 4 different locations were chosen for potential passing when no trains called there at the time - stopping trains in the middle of nowhere can seem a tad odd. You also have to wonder why 2 of the single sections were nearly 20 miles in length for a 2 hourly service - it doesn't give much recovery time. As it happens Yeovil-Sherborne's second track was reinstated later in 1967 because the timetable couldn't cope as it was. (Tisbury loop was added in 1986 - it's outside the station because the other platform had been sold off. Axminster obviously got its loop in 2009).

There was certainly a case for saving on costs, but it does look like there was an air of trying to ensure as quickly as possible the Waterloo route could never compete again.

I would say that an old boss of mine, an Exonian, John Beer who was SWT's West of England Line Manager said to me in 1994 that he believed the 67 singling saved the line.

I was a bit sceptical then (thinking of fast competing services) but have long since changed my mind.  I was lucky enough to be at Axminster a year ago for the opening of the passing loop - that's the key, clockface hourly services and the route to a perfect division of traffic - Exeter fast and semi-fast to Paddington, Waterloo hourly stoppers.

What would any of the 60s railwaymen/women on the Waterloo line have given for a traditional SR clockface service.........

Reading the contemporary articles from Modern Railways (and this was quite an issue in the mid '60s), it's clear that saving money was the only game in town.

From Modern Railways April 1967:

'Paddington's argument is that what is offered now is better than no railway at all. The Parliamentary mandate to make rail services pay or abandon them has not been rescinded - not yet, at any rate. On its past financial perfomance, the Salisbury- Exeter line was a candidate for extinction, but the WR has rather striven to give it the best possible service consistent with getting its costs and revenue in balance'

On track singling:

'A six mile stretch of double track is being left between Templecombe and Sherborne and the new timetable is framed so that the two hourly expresses each way will pass each other on this section at speed. Honiton, Chard Junction and Gillingham will also have short passing loops; the first of these will see some scheduled passing movements between expresses and other traffic, but the other two are chiefly standbys for an emergency'

There's certainly a good division of services to London, today. However, the intention for the Waterloo route was for a limited stop semi-fast service (still described as 'expresses' in the 1960s articles in Modern Railways and notably still offering full restaurant car services) serving the 6 main centres between Salisbury and Exeter: Gillingham, Sherborne, Yeovil, Crewkerne, Axminster and Honiton (with a few trains stopping at Whimple, and Tisbury). However, today's trains on this line all serve 9 or 10 stations (with Cranbrook still to open), so the potential time advantages for a limited stop semi-fast service have not been realised.

To add a bit further to teh singling of teh Slisbury Exter, it is probably little know that in teh early 60s the Southerrn S&T department was busy putting in colour light distant signals in at most boxes on the line.

I remember because it was part of my job to help the Special A clerk amend the specific signal box instructions for the box when its colour lights were installed.

The change was to include, "During fog and falling snow when single working was in place on the down/up line between  A & B unless fogmen were in place fog working (double block) should be implemented.

The logic behind this instruction which would only be implemented in very unlikely event of both single line working being in operation during fog or falling snow, was that if a train was travelling wrong line past the distant signal because the signal was focussed towards  the right line the driver might miss it (and obviously no AWS magnet).

That was how we did safety in the 60s.

The tragedy was that all that investment was ripped out when th line was singled

The signalling changes and new track layouts for the 3 stage 1967 singling programme can be found on the Signalling Record Website here:

http://www.s-r-s.org.uk/archivesignals/brwr/1967-s2507.pdf

http://www.s-r-s.org.uk/archivesignals/brwr/1967-s2511.pdf

http://www.s-r-s.org.uk/archivesignals/brwr/1967-s2515.pdf

And when they found that their original plan was flawed, redoubling between Sherborne and Yeovil Junction:


http://www.s-r-s.org.uk/archivesignals/brwr/1967-s2528.pdf


And the January 1965 Waterloo - Exeter timetable is here - note the lack of a through 11am train from Waterloo after the ACE was withdrawn in September 1964:

http://www.timetableworld.com/book_viewer.php?id=12&section_id=12

Modern Railways April,October and November 1964 and April 1967 cover the Waterloo - Exeter changes is some detail. I have PDF versions which I can email, if anyone is interested. They are too large to attach here.
PM me (with your email address) if you would like me to email you the PDFs.

Why would there have been a need for reversal if trains started at Waterloo?

Trains travelling from Waterloo enter Exeter St Davids Station from the south whereas trains from Paddington enter the same station from the north. Therefore if Waterloo had been the principal terminus for the South West from 1964 onwards, trains entering St Davids would, if they were to continue to Plymouth and Penzance along the favoured GWR route (rather than the SR's line via Okehampton to Plymouth), have had to have left St Davids from the same end of the station that they entered it. The argument was that this would have been time wasting as it would have required an engine change for every train going beyond Exeter (or at least detaching the engine from one end of the train and attaching it to the other end).  The same changes would have also been necessary for every Waterloo bound train.

Ah,right.I was assuming that the surveys went the whole hog as far as switching to the SR line was concerned and carried on from Exeter to Plymouth via Okehampton/Tavistock.BTW,were those surveys ever published in any form? Frankly,i find it difficult to believe that the GWR route attracted 5 times as many passengers as the SR one back in the 1950's/1960's.

What has to be remembered is that many of the surveys carried out as part of the 'Reshaping of British Railways' were very narrow in their scope. At the time an integrated rail network was seen as anachronistic. Roads and the private car were seen as the future. Particularly when you remember that Dr B was hired by Minister of Transport Ernest Marples. Whilst Marples was required by parliamentary rules to divest of his interest in road building company Marples Ridgeway Ltd on becoming a Minister, lest it be seen he had a conflict of interests; he did so in a sneaky (but allowed) way: Selling his shares to his wife!

And we think today's politicians are nowt but a self serving bunch of .....*


*Insert your own noun as you see fit.

From Modern Railways, April 1964:

'The hardening of BR opinion in favour of retaining the Taunton - Newbury - Reading main line as the chief London - South-West express route has been influenced chiefly by two factors. The first is that five times as many passengers presently take Paddington trains for Exeter and beyond as do Waterloo departures; there is less danger of alienating public opinion by concentrating traffic on the ex-GWR route. Secondly, cardinal importance is attached to highly competitive speed of service, which BR feel would be jeopardised if all expresses had to stop at both Exeter stations and reverse at St Davids. BR wisely have a long-term eye on the effects of future road developments on overall journey times'

Also from the same edition in relation to journey times:

'Also mentioned was the new daily business service to be introduced this summer linking Plymouth and Paddington in less than 4 hr.... This is the BR answer to the immediate threat of a Plymouth - London air service'


From Modern Railways, April 1967:

'The foundation for the decision to make the Westbury - Taunton line the principle route to the West was a costing exercise conducted jointly by the SR and WR. The bulk of London - West Country passengers used the Paddington route to Exeter and made a bigger contribution to the total costs of running their expresses than did those between Salisbury and Exeter'

Given these articles were published 45 years ago, it would be difficult to verify their accuracy or otherwise. However, given the authors were presumably the Roger Fords of their day with close links to the rail industry, I would assume that there is a considerable element of truth in what they were writing. Unfortunately those involved in the original decisions would probably be in their 90s now, if they are still alive.

I should also perhaps point out in fairness after my last post that Honiton and Gillingham, 2 of the busiest stations after Yeovil Junction today, were always poorly served in comparison to other stations before the regime change. Templecombe, Axminster and Sidmouth Junction were favoured as express stops due to their branch line connections. The 2 hourly service actually gave them an improved service compared to what went before.

The economies may have saved the line, but at the same time there would be increased maintenance of the remaining track due to an increase in the number of trains using it. It's a shame that well into the 1980s BR were constantly told by differing governments to make economies and that often meant singling lines which can create considerable delays - Burngullow - Probus was one (1986) until redoubling in 2004, Dorchester South-Moreton is one today that can cause problems as trains are scheduled virtually all day to meet not far west of Dorchester  and Cockett - Dyffyrn is another (the last two aren't really on FGW territory apart from a handful of Carmarthen services but they are close by). That short-sightedness seems to have gone (for now anyway).

You're right about the stopping patterns - Crewkerne had 3 direct trains from Waterloo from 7 September 1964 (none before that date) and Gillingham 5 direct trains from Waterloo from 7 September 1964 (only 1 before that date).

In terms of overall numbers of trains, the WR estimated that the 1967 service along the Salisbury-Exeter line represented 50% less passenger and parcels mileage and 40% less freight mileage than that operated in 1962.

They certainly overestimated the long term London-Plymouth air threat! ;D

I'm sure I read somewhere that BR Southern had plans in the late 50's maybe early 60's that for the services to Exeter and West there off (talking the EX Southern routes here) that a Fleet of Hastings Line style DEMU's were planned. Built to Normal (and Not Rip Off contractors Hastings line) body size.

That would have been interesting Thumpers to Bideford and Padstow.  :D

Shame it never happened.

That's interesting.  I've read that the SR was already planning to cut the services West of Exeter before the WR took over in 1963 and that they put forward proposals for faster steam hauled Waterloo to Exeter Central services for 1963 - the fastest time would have been reduced to 2 hours 48 minutes.